Take a chance on me

John Mahoney left Britain more than 40 years ago and risked all to begin acting at the age of 37. Now famous as Frasier's dad, he likes beating John Malkovich at cards - and understands why marriage was a step too far

John Mahoney's story is a good one. Inspiring, in fact. He may not have gone as far as fires in a bucket or living off windfalls and tinned sardines, as Larkin's fantasy had it, but he did dare to shout 'Stuff your pension!' when he was 37, and has never had cause to regret it. Every so often, he gets a letter from someone saying that his success on Broadway, in Hollywood and most recently in the US comedy series Frasier (in which he plays Marty Crane, a no-nonsense ex-cop amiably baffled by the behaviour of his two fastidious, over-educated sons) has spurred them on to try the same thing. He really hates it when that happens.

One man wrote to him full of excitement, saying he was so fired up by Mahoney's example he was quitting the nine to five. 'And the next thing I know he's getting divorced because he's not getting work and his wife's not putting up with it. So eventually he went back to doing what he'd been doing before, and in the meantime he'd lost his wife and family.' Mahoney sighs. 'Believe me, I'm an aberration. With me, it was all the stars aligning at exactly the right time. There was so much luck involved.'

Luck in that he landed his first proper stage roles because the actors pencilled in got sick, or were offered better-paid roles elsewhere. He didn't really begin to make a name for himself until his mid-forties, but in the months immediately following his resignation from an obscure medical journal, Mahoney had already come to the attention of David Mamet and John Malkovich, who invited him to join Chicago's then-fledgling Steppenwolf Theatre Company. 'So much luck! I'm not putting myself down, I'm not saying I don't have talent - I must have, to have got this far - but I honestly believe that some of the greatest actors in America are tending bar and waiting tables and driving taxis, and it will never happen for them.'

Mahoney is sitting in his Galway hotel room, the window open to the racket of trains and seagulls in an attempt to dispel the smoke from his occasional Marlboro Light. In his tan slacks and green short-sleeved shirt, with a vest popping up to say hi around the collar, and a pair of comfy, squidgy-looking trainers more suited to sauntering towards a cold beer than racing for a place on the winner's podium, he looks so like an American tourist, it's not true. (There's a nice moment at the end of the interview when we get out of the lift in the lobby, much to the incredulity of a group of middle-aged Americans just off the tour bus.)

He's in Ireland to reprise his role in Michael Healey's The Drawer Boy, a three-hander about friendship and memory, which he performed in Chicago last year with Steppenwolf. It's a little bit Of Mice and Men, a little bit Rain Man, and he takes the unflashy, ambivalent role of the guardian figure. Mahoney is 62, and says that at his age, there are only so many Willy Lomans and James Tyrones you can play. 'So I'm always on the lookout for roles that are the right age for me.' The Irish reviews have been good and there is a possibility that next summer, during Mahoney's recess from Frasier - which records in Los Angeles between August and March - he may bring it to London.

In fact, Mahoney was born in Britain; in Blackpool, where his family were evacuated from Manchester during the war. Eccentrically, a few years ago, he bought a house in Stockport. His brother Bernard and sister-in-law Sue live in it now and, when he is in that neck of the woods, he stays with them. He assures me it isn't posh. 'Terraced?' I ask, hopefully.

'No, sorry, it's detached,' he says with a twinkle.

The house purchase is interesting, because 40 years ago, he couldn't wait to get away from the area. He still associates Manchester with bleakness. 'When I was growing up there, I was playing in the air-raid shelters and bombed-out buildings. I associate Manchester with need and want and ration books... with dirt and smoke and smog and fog. I know all that's gone now, but that's what stays in my head.'

His Irish father, Reg, was a baker. His mother, Margaret, looked after their eight children (John was the seventh). The house was small and privacy was in short supply. Like his mother, Mahoney found it in library books; his father, in the piano. The marriage was not happy. 'I remember the bruising silences. My dad would come home from work, and he wouldn't even say hello to my mother - it just never occurred to him - and he'd take off his coat and go into the parlour, and he'd start playing Schumann. My mother would be cooking dinner and she'd say, "Reg, dinner's ready," and he'd get up and they might exchange three or four words over the table, and then he'd go back into the parlour. It was almost like two strangers, except when they did get to each other, when they'd have some big, pretty terrible arguments.'

When he was growing up, Mahoney's desire to leave Manchester was much stronger than his desire to act. (The only thing to have survived the transatlantic crossing was his Catholicism. There's not even a scrap of an accent left.) One of his sisters, Vera, was a GI bride and from the farm in Illinois sent back snapshots of her prosperous new life: sunshine, smart clothes, healthy-looking kids. Hooked, her 19-year-old brother swapped the offer of a place at Birmingham Rep for a ticket to the States.

Settling in was a tough and lonely business. To speed up the citizenship process, he joined the US army, and then studied literature at college (he did his thesis on Hawthorne), supporting himself by working as a hospital orderly. Acting was not even a fantasy at this stage, because he was anxious not to sponge off his brother-in-law. He did some teaching but felt he wasn't very good at it, and then, because of his medical experience, drifted into editing The Journal for the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals , which came with a decent salary and an office on the 45th floor of Chicago's John Hancock building.

At this point, he had what his friends and family assumed was a midlife crisis, but which turned out to be his way of averting one. 'I think I could have been heading for something serious, because it was a very dark period in my life,' he says. 'I'd come home from work with a six-pack, turn on the TV and just vegetate there, getting deeper and deeper into myself. More and more miserable, drinking, drinking, drinking... I knew I had to do some thing with my life. I had a terrific job, I could come and go as I pleased, but it was so stultifying.'

Briefly back in Manchester, he went to see Albert Finney and Leo McKern in Uncle Vanya and loved it so much, he returned to the box office the following afternoon. 'I saw old Leo McKern died,' he remarks. 'Did you see that? He was a big influence on me. I had this idea in my head that actors were all grand and sophisticated. And I go to get the tickets, and there's Leo McKern, sitting in the little coffee shop there, unshaven, eating a sausage roll, drinking his coffee, laughing, and I look at him, and I'm thinking to myself: "They're just people, they're just like I am." It made a huge impression.'

Back in Chicago, he joined an eight-week acting class and handed in his notice when Mamet, his teacher, cast him in The Water Engine. 'I didn't want a life of regret, and I certainly didn't want a life spent writing about medical problems.'

Mahoney knows that if he'd had a family to support, he might not have been quite so cavalier. He always expected to marry, and has had several long-term relationships, but it never happened for him. 'I was never very mature in my relationships with women. First sign of conflict, I was gone. Wouldn't discuss it, because I was afraid it would lead to an argument. And it's weird, because my brothers and sisters all have great marriages. I took the fear of marriage from my parents' relationship, because I didn't want to end up in a relationship like that, whereas my brothers and sisters learnt a lesson from it and made sure they didn't carry it on into their own marriages.' As for company, he has a big extended family, and then there's Steppenwolf. 'We just don't sit around pontificating about art. We talk about baseball... football. There are people we've worked with, guest stars, who if they'd only been a little more human, would have been invited to join the company. But they were just a little too ethereal for us. We're a very down-to-earth group of people.'

I say that this is not quite how we see John Malkovich, for instance.

Mahoney laughs. 'John's not mysterious or menacing. Maybe he likes to give that impression, or maybe that's what people need to see him as. To me, he's just a guy from a small town in Illinois, who goes to basketball games - he loves basketball - and who comes over to my house for Thanksgiving dinner and makes the best gravy I've ever tasted.'

Though Mahoney seems a pretty regular kind of chap, it's plain that he, unlike many of us, is happy with risk. So it comes as no surprise to hear that yes indeed, he gambles recreationally as well. Turns out that he, like the rest of Steppenwolf, loves cards - though, unexpectedly, high stakes freak him out (he prefers nickel and dime poker and has never lost more than $30 in an evening). 'I like to play cards, oh yeah. I am an obsessive person - I don't want to play cards for two hours, I want to play cards all night .' He perks up just thinking about it. 'We all meet at my house in Oak Park, or in my little cabin in Wisconsin, and have marathon sessions of a game called May-I. Laurie Metcalf springs to mind as a really cutthroat card player. John Malkovich is a moaner. He's always bitching because he didn't get any wild cards. Ha ha! And we sit there all night. Pizza, beer, potato chips, spaghetti and meatballs if we feel particularly ambitious. At Laurie's house in Hollywood she has a, waddya call it, what's that game, big board, black and white, no, not backgammon, where you throw the dice? Craps! She has a crap table. We play craps there for hours.'

Mahoney, who calls himself 'a bit of a hermit', may lead a solitary sort of life in his Chicago suburb, eating out and going to the cinema on his own, and spending quiet weekends with his fishing rod, but you can tell that he adores these occasional social orgies. He misses Chicago - the beaches, the parks, the architecture, the orchestra, the sensibility - very much when he's confined to Los Angeles, and that's the reason why he has decided not to sign again with NBC when he has completed the terms of his contract and recorded two more series of Frasier . 'I love the show, I'm immensely proud of being on a show that has been so honoured, but at the same time it's not where I live, and that's what drives me crazy. It's geographical, totally. If the show shot in Chicago, I'd shoot it for 20 years. But I just miss home so much. And I miss stage work. So I'd hate for Frasier to go on without me, but I'm afraid it would have to.'

He tells me about his apartment in Santa Monica, which has the bare bones of a life in it (much like this hotel room: the only signs that someone is staying in it are a half-completed crossword and a virgin Twix), and how he can't wait to give the few sticks of furniture to the Salvation Army, throw the CDs and books in the back of a van, and head off back towards the Midwest as soon as the final episode is in the can. 'Home is where the heart is,' he says, apologetic, but sounding relieved that he found it at last.

&#183 The Drawer Boy is at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin until 10 August

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